


heart-tree

by raa



Category: Uprooted - Naomi Novik
Genre: F/F, Original Character(s), Politics, Post-Canon, Yuletide 2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-19
Packaged: 2018-09-09 12:04:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8890129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raa/pseuds/raa
Summary: I didn't want Marisha to have to be brave. I wanted to save her, or failing that, for someone else to save her, as Nieshka had saved me—first from the Dragon, then from that terrible tree—and after that, saved us all.





	1. Polnya

**Author's Note:**

  * For [telarna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/telarna/gifts).



The women of my valley marry young.

Ours is a fertile land, and the Spindle, our river, knows only its own time. Not sun all the days of summer can coax it away from its riverbed, nor pressing rains tempt it into reaching over its banks. Year by year, it bubbles forth, promising with each gurgle yet another good harvest. 

When the Wood still loomed over us, large and black, we knew well enough what they said of us in other parts: we were plain rural folk, a little foolish, content to live out our days in evil's shadow. Why else did we submit when the Dragon took one of our girls? But even then, with walkers trailing our steps and wolves stalking out from shadows to snap their jaws at our cows, we were prosperous enough that a man might expect, upon coming of age, to receive his own plot of land. It would be small, just a little corner of earth to call his, but enough: enough to dream of starting a family. And if the terrible stain of the Wood against the rising sun each morning did not exactly comfort the children, our pastures stretched far yet, and our golden fields of wheat grew tall and sturdy.

For a time after the Wood was defeated, our valley was the only place women married at all. The Wood, in its last, furious taking, had not been kind to Polnya. In the Yellow Marshes, where nearly every family had sent a son or two to die in our valley, the women began to leave their fathers' homes and live together, planting and washing and rooting and herding in shifts until the young baron's advisors understood that here, finally, was a way to keep his lands from lying fallow. In the capital, after a time, it became fashionable, too, for women to enter into other work, men's work, for it soon became clear that even among rich merchants, there were few enough men that more than a quarter of the young women would go without husbands. The capital sent inquiring men to each village of our valley, looking for those willing to soldier, or to learn a new trade in Kralia, but question after question was met with refusal: No, they would not leave, not for a place in a prosperous carpenter's shop, not for a handsome ship and a captain's hat, not for a dowry of silver and the hand of a baron's daughter, not for all the gold in little King Stashek's treasury.

I lived in the capital by then: Stashek had named me captain of his guard, and for months, large, jovial men in coats with puffy sleeves joined me as I trekked between the training grounds and the King's Tower, to ask me why the men of my valley would not leave, not even for ready money. They worried themselves when Rosyan men, hearing that our shortage was even more severe than theirs, began to venture over borders and mountain passes to seek richly dowered wives. They worried themselves more when their housekeepers and maids signed the lists to join our army, left libraries and kitchens and washrooms and breweries for distant lands and butcher's shops and blacksmith's stations. When, finally, it was their own daughters who left home, they summoned me to court for answers.

I did try to explain, though I knew it was a silly question. My valley—it was mine, still, even if I did not belong there anymore—was small. Two thousand people, perhaps three. Hardly enough to fill the ranks of the army Marek had shattered against the base of the Dragon's tower. But I knew too, why they asked, for each time the question was posed, I thought of Agnieszka in her little tree-cottage laying out large baskets of golden fruit beside her door. It was a good life she led there—a good life we had all led there—and now there was no Wood, it was a life anyone would be loathe to leave.

But I had not been happy there. In the end, I told the court I could not speak for them—and really by them, I meant, for _her,_ for Agnieszka. I could not speak for her: she had stayed, I had left. And what's more, I had always meant to leave—I had not even done it for gold.

The Magnati shrugged their shoulders, and laughed, with the hearty boisterous laughter of men who thought they had solved a puzzle. They said, you can't ask someone sane to explain someone crazy, even if they are brothers.

I didn't tell them then that I, too, had wanted nothing else, once, than a flock of sheep to shear, a few cows to milk, children of my own tucked in their beds in a cozy house, and the murmur of the Spindle spilling in through the windows. I had wanted that until I learned better. Then I knew there was no place for me in that valley anymore.

  

* * *

 

 

The year our princess turned eight, a new ambassador and his wife came from Rosya, a wizard and a witch married only fifteen years past. Count Drugov was a sharp-eyed sliver of a man who had a habit of talking to you while looking just a little beyond you, while the Countess Drugova was fat and comfortable, and always smiling. Stashek liked them well enough, and I could not help but like them too. They had a way of seeing you, instead of who you were, but I thought that perhaps it was only because they were wizards and therefore knew, as I did, how it was to always be talked about, and seldom talked to, even around lords.

"He's always been a fool," Solya said at dinner the night they arrived. "They"—by _they_ , he meant the szlachta—"like us little enough already, but to be joined in marriage!"

"And to that hedge-witch," snorted Ragostok. "I've seen her, exhausted over little nothings. Well, even the best can lose their heads."

He meant that she was not really a magician, the ambassador's wife, only a woman with some magic who had not yet attempted, in her forty years, a great working of any kind. But a few months later, when Sarkan returned from Venezia, he said to us quietly under the din of Alosha's smithy, "Ragostok may call her that, but Larisa Smirnova hails from the other side of the Wood, and I've seen a few of her workings. Her style is not unlike Agnieszka's."

"Like Agnieszka's?" said Alosha, clearly alarmed. She thrust the sword she had been hammering into the waiting hands of her assistant, but took it back the next moment, to shove it in another girl's hands. "Take off that coat and pin up those braids," she commanded Renata, who hurried away, pins spilling out of the tailcoat she had already shrugged one arm out of. "You can't mean that," Alosha told the Dragon. "If it's so, we're in trouble. Drugov cried war more loudly than anyone, twenty years ago."

"Her style, I said," returned Sarkan dryly. "Not her strength, or her—force of personality."

"Well," said Alosha, "Larisa captured the Welder's interest, so she can't be as meek as she pretends to be."

"I think not," agreed Sarkan. "But you can't fight the Wood for decades and think the same of what we owe to our kingdoms—we may have her to thank if the treaty is renewed."

And we did, after a time, for in the spring of my twenty-eighth year, with the death of his grandfather and at the tender of age of sixteen, Stashek became Kasimir IV of Polnya. That same year, the crown prince of Rosya came in an envoy over the mountains to the capital, thirty years exactly since his uncle Vasily had once come, and on the day the Princess Regelinda Maria Algirdon celebrated her thirteenth birthday, Drugova and her husband watched as Stashek signed away his sister's hand in marriage—to Rosya.

They had rumored such, for years, as Polnyan women more and more often married Rosyan men. How symbolic it would be: a marriage to fix what had once gone sour, Queen Hanna's granddaughter to Prince Vasily's nephew, to match what had become of our countries, what we saw every day in the streets of Kralia. Drugova and her husband had probably started the rumors themselves, so eagerly did they champion the peace they sought, though I thought it likely they were afraid: Rosya had not a wizard like Sarkan, and to his ranks we had added yet another, Agnieszka. So while it did not surprise me when Drugova pampered Marisha, and gave her little gifts, and talked of how graceful she was, what a good queen she would be, I did not really think much of it until the day I found Solya kneeling next to Marisha in a small courtyard, pouring magic into a simple scrape on her knee, as he had no talent for Healing.

"You must watch how you behave," he was saying to her. "No more of this skipping, for one day you shall be queen of Rosya and they shall all judge you for your grace there."

"Don't," I told him, coming forward.

"Don't you like the Countess Drugova?" he asked Marisha. "She shall be there, too."

"She's too young for this," I protested.

"I think not." He rose, pushing his cape behind him with a practiced swirl. "She isn't like you, Kasia—she was never a peasant girl running between fields with her best friend. She is the princess of Polnya: she has known it all these years."

"Look at her face," I told him. "Does it seem your words might please the king, when it makes his sister cry so?"

"But I _am_ thinking for Polnya. A treaty left unsealed by marriage is one undone at any time."

"No," I said, the word spilling out of me. Something I had not felt for years was rising up within me. Marisha was too large, by then, for carrying—a girl of nine—but I swept her up and thought with all my strength, which was considerable: _Not yet_. It was too soon for Marisha to learn better, to learn what could not be unlearned.

"The king was not seven when he agreed to his betrothal," Solya called after me. "You were there—you must remember! Don't hide from the truth, Kasia!"

If I hadn't been so angry, I would have snorted. To think it was Solya saying so—Solya, who could lie to himself better than anyone I had ever met. I had to fight not to tighten my grip around Marisha, though it had been many years since I was afraid of my own strength.

She fixed me with her large dark eyes as I wound up the tower towards the safety of my rooms. "Is it true?" she asked me. "Kasia, is it true? 

I felt my heart stop then start again, and I set her down gently, thinking desperately of what I could say.

In the end, I could not lie to her.

I said, "I don't know."

 

 

* * *

 

When Nieshka had gone skipping home, trotting over fallen logs and tall weeds with her singsong ease, I used to sit at the one west-facing window in our house and look out at the Dragon's white tower. I watched it in rain and in shine—watched as the lightning he called down struck and illuminated the white stones briefly, watched the wisps drift up the road until they disappeared, watched the sun set behind his tower in a haze of orange, so that a long thin shadow stretched out into Olshanka.

Before I woke, wooden-headed and wooden-fingered, in Kasia's bed, I had seen the Dragon only twice, once at our choosing, and once as a small child. _That_ had been the year of the Green Summer, when he returned early from court and came to Danka's house, where we had tied down the sickest of our neighbors. He was no more than a curiosity to me then: he was only the mysterious lord who might one day pick me or Agnieszka or one of the other Dragon-born girls. Still, I had gaped, fascinated, when he fed Danka's brother a clear potion, his rings clicking against the vial, and Danka's brother suddenly, miraculously stopped thrashing. There had been something there in him, something like Agnieszka—I must have sensed magic, I decided later when I had learned that Nieshka was a witch, too—that I caught as he impatiently waved away the drops that fell on his shining boots. Later, I remembered that with him had come with a round-faced young woman who cleaned off the vials before stoppering them, but I thought nothing of it then. I was not six, and I had not learned yet that there was no place for me in the place I called home. 

But three years later, when that woman had left her family in Vyosna for Gidna, speaking of her longing for the sea, I began to spy at the market in Olshanka on her replacement, Marzena. She was easy to spot: tall, graceful, and elegant, if not beautiful, and she had a musical voice, pitched low, which we would fall silent to hear, even if she asked for something as prosaic as another dozen buns. Those first years, she had friends—she would stop and chat with neat, cheerful women about her age. But as the years passed, people skirted away from her, men and women alike, walking in large semicircles around her fine dresses to pass her. Calmly, singing softly as if she were alone, she would wrap her buns and her new spools of yarn and a few small wood carvings in a large scarf, and then begin the trek back west, a solitary figure on the road.

She caught me following her that last summer, and she stopped completely, staring at me, her face suddenly white. Then she came to me, holding her hands out, saying, in that beautiful voice, "So you are Wensa's child—Kasia."

I had seen the pitying looks before, had even been greeted thus a few times, but Marzena was neither kindly nor condescending. She did not examine my face—she rubbed my hands to warm them, and said, "On the choosing day, pack a few things that remind you of home: the tower is beautiful, but cold."

"How do you know my mother?" I asked her.

She shook her head. "They talk of you sometimes at my mother's house."

"Then you—go home often?"

"Home! Well, I—" She let go of my hands and pressed them to her cheeks. "I did, at first. He isn't cruel, if you ask him—don't be afraid to ask."

I must be brave, I told myself, and I promised her, "I won't."

I didn't ask Marzena if she would leave—I already knew she would—or why she had stopped going home, for I knew that too. After I was chosen, I thought that I too would sometimes wander the market, and over time people would stop looking me in the eye, slightly embarrassed that their daughter, and not me, had escaped. 

But, I thought swiftly then, that would never quite be my fate, for Nieshka would still love me. She would never look at my fine dress and fail to see me, just me. If she knew I'd be at the fair, she would come, and she would run up and embrace me and talk to me of the rabbit she had found burrowing or the cherries and how tart they were this year.

In the ten years I would live in that tower, it was impossible that she would not marry. They had shied away from us, the boys our age, but I had caught them watching us, and not only me. Their eyes had followed me with only idle curiosity: I was the Dragon's next girl. But they watched Nieshka more warmly, with interest, and at the festivals sometimes they would come up not shyly but with laughter and a grin: _Dance with me, Nieshka,_ and she would laugh, too, taking their hands and skipping out with bare feet, tossing her tangled braids back as they wound about in circles.

It was terrible to imagine her married, but I thought then that a man who could love Agnieszka would not be so bad. I didn't know where I would go after my ten years, but I thought, at the very least, that when I was lonely, I could always go to her house, to watch her roll out the dough for a pie and to help her mend the many holes in her stockings. I would see how she was happy with her husband, her house slightly untidy and humming with life, and I would hide my envy behind a smile: I would be good at that, by then. Much better than I was now.

I thought that even if she was married I would ask her, when the time came, to come with me. But I knew that she was too much of the valley to ever wish to.

And I knew I would leave.

 

* * *

 

I dreamed all my childhood of what I would be at twenty-eight, who I could be, and the stranger the idea, the more I dwelled upon it. I rather liked the idea of going to sea, as the woman before Marzena had, or joining the next troupe of players to come through our village. Other times, I imagined opening a small shop in Kralia, and selling outrageous cakes. But mostly, I dreamed of traveling from place to place, sparingly spending my dowry of silver, writing my brothers and sisters letters from places they had never heard of. It was only on gray days I thought I would merely take my dowry to the University, to pay the tuition there, and dutifully send home my wages when I had found a place as an archivist or an army doctor or what-have-you.

I had never once, in all those years, imagined myself captain of the king's guard. Yet it was better than anything I had dreamed, even the tedious business of practicing, which was only the more tedious because I was afraid to hurt my partners. Sometimes Stashek and I fought Alosha together, and those were the times I liked best, for against Alosha I never had to be careful.

How I would have laughed, as a child, to think I would enjoy an afternoon of swordplay more than a party or a feast. Yet, though Alosha's great-great-granddaughter, a friendly young matron, taught me all the court dances and the names and histories of all the szlachta, though I wore to these dresses as fine as any Agnieszka could wave out of thin air, finer than the black velvet she had worn that dreadful night we burned Dvenrik's cows, I dreaded the parties at first.

"You'll get used to it," said Solya at Stashek's coronation feast. "See Ragostok there— _there's_ the joy of it. Learn to enjoy being admired."

I knew what it was to be admired. Only, back home, I had been _admired_  for what everyone knew was true: I had the prettiest voice, or the neatest stitches, and I learned to a bake cakes fit for a lord. Now, instead, I found that I was forever being told things I was not: the _finest_ swordsman in all Polnya, who had slain a hundred silver mantises in the Wood to free Queen Hanna; a traitor tree of the Wood who had turned part-human to rise up against the Wood-queen; even, once, the girl Marek had lost his head over, riding through the valley. He had seen me from a distance, they told me, and ridden into the Wood to rescue me when I was taken, only, passing through the Wood, he had found me tied to the same tree as his mother the Queen. Solya, who floated at my elbow at these things, would laugh at these stories, and when I would protest, he interjected, "But did you know…", and the courtiers would make magnificent cooing sounds at whatever he said.

I liked even less the small, tight boxes we were carried in, and the first time I was to step in one, I understood suddenly why from the window of the tower the Queen and I had occupied that spring I had seen Agnieszka walking to and fro stiffly, her dresses trailing behind her. I backed away from the box—I was too heavy, in any case, for only two men to carry—and from then on, I refused all invitations too far from the castle, saying I did not wish to leave the king unguarded.

But when we returned to the capital, Sarkan, who had resigned his post—there was little he could do for the valley now, he said, that Agnieszka could not do by herself—to fight the corruption in Kralia, pulled me aside as I arrived at the Countess Boguslava's house. 

"Agnieszka did it, walked from place to place," I told him.

"Agnieszka," he said, with awful precision, "is an intolerable pigheaded little fool, and she at least could have afforded it. I thought you a sensible girl, but I see I am mistaken."

"I'm too much to carry," I protested. "Four soldiers together can barely push me over. How many men do you suppose they would need to lift me?"

"As many as need be," he snapped. "And tell Stashek to see to your title, better yet to have you adopted formally to the family."

"But I—"

"Do you intend to stay there, then? Live in a tree with twigs for friends?"

I opened my mouth to tell him _of course not_. I had already left, hadn't I? But I thought suddenly of Agnieszka and could say nothing at all.

"Perhaps you haven't decided," he said, more gently. "But if you're to do the king and his sister some good, you'll have to _be_ someone, not just a good knight. I thought Alosha or Estera would remind you, but I suppose they've forgotten you're not like the rest of us. A wizard can only be feared by the szlachta, but you, Kasia, might yet be loved."

I did not like to be loved by the szlachta, though. The more ambitious of the young men wrote me poems or offered for my hand: was this love? No more, I thought, than the knowing smiles the boys back home had given me, and their veiled hints: "Aren't you _glad_ , Kasia?"

One of Stashek's guards, sweeter, pressed a basket into my hands on harvest day. I opened it to find a thick, golden-brown loaf of egg bread—his mother's—and as I admired it, Grzegorz coughed, blushing, and said, "Kasia. Kasia, marry me, and we shall protect the king together. I'm neither magician nor lord, but I've more care for you than any of them, don't you see?"

I tried to explain—I didn't want to marry him: not him nor anybody else. I had left—didn't anybody understand? I had left all that behind, and come to Kralia, to chase a different dream, something much better than my old dreams, all the better because this was _real._ It was _me_ that the children wanted. I had come with them from necessity; Marisha would not sleep unless I was near. But sometimes at night, shuddering as I woke from dreams of my time in the Wood, I would remember the golden clarity of Agnieszka's _Summoning_ , and, sitting up, I would try to face myself: I liked that they needed me, liked that I had become somebody in my own right, not just someone waiting to be chosen, or _that girl who was also rescued with the Queen_ or even Nieshka's friend. So I didn't want to marry, not to a sweet guard whose mother would wonder if I could have childen, and not to a lord who only wished to earn Stashek's favor.

Soon enough I began to take pleasure, too, in the feasts and the dinners. Diplomacy and a certain degree of politicking suited me, and I began to remember the dreams I had only half-allowed myself as a child: beautiful dresses and a whole host of friends in the capital, far away things. I had known that I would never achieve it, not any more than I could run away as a pirate, and yet, somehow, incredibly, here I was. I was free, finally, to be myself, and if myself was stronger and stranger and oddly heavy and still not person to be talked to, only looked at, it was still _my_ story I was living, _my_ future I had chosen, and I was glad.

I wrote to Nieshka often, telling her of the funny things I had learned about the Baron of This, or the Count That, and even better, the things I had learned about Venezia and Moldova, and she would write me back, sending a large jar of Spindle-water each time. She found a new apprentice, Karolya, when I had been in the capital nearly four years, who had magic similar to hers, and they had been slowly searching the old scraps in the Dragon's tower, to learn more of the people who had come before us. I could never read her letters all at once: I had to read them in parts, to savor them, I thought, but also because reading them through with impatience—as I had at first—made me feel strangely alone. We had been best friends, I told myself, and would remain so, but it was only natural our worlds had grown so far apart, when we could not be near each other. And I was happy to tell her what I had learned, what I had done, because now we were both, finally, living _our_ stories.

I had helped Stashek face the doubtful Magnati, uncovered at dinners the szlachta's maneouverings, even talked the ambassador from Vengary out of retiring from offense once. But all month long before Stashek signed the treaty, I counted up all things I had done, and could do, and I knew all of these together were not enough. The story I had chosen took on a new, gray pallor as I understood, suddenly, that Marisha would be forced, as I had once thought I would be forced, into a terrible future. My family had loved well enough, but they had been willing to trade a peasant girl to keep their valley safe. And now, to save Polnya, we would trade Marisha away.

Alosha snorted when I came to her smithy: "They didn't grow up as you did," she said, not knowing how I had cursed every graceful step, wished even sometimes to be disfigured, only to think: what if it won't help and he'll choose me anyway? "They know their duty."

"I know," I said, "but surely, surely—maybe the Duke of Galidna—"

"Sigmund did it," said Alosha grimly, "and Stashek has, too. Galidna's stable enough. Rosya, on the other hand—"

But that was the point, I thought to myself furiously, walking away from her before she could finish. No one had asked Princess Malgorzhata if she wished to be married to a kingdom haunted by the Wood. Maybe if they had, her daughter would not be signed away now. I tried Solya next, telling him how I thought he, of all people, could talk us out of this marriage, but he had found a new friend in the Rosyan court, a handsome general who, despite fighting him for years, had admired his war efforts, and he shook his head at me.

"What's come into you, Kasia?" he said. "It's as if you've lost your head and become Agnieszka. But it isn't the Wood we're fighting now."

So, desperately, I went to the house where Drugov and his wife stayed, to see how they saw it.

"We've had peace these ten years past," I said. "Surely—"

"A good peace too," said Drugov, looking at the cups on the cabinet behind me.

"Then we needn't—"

"My child," said Drugova, "I shall call you Kasia, and you shall call me Larisa."

I had met many women in the capital who talked to me thus—and knew it to be a ploy—but how could I refuse, when I wanted something of her? "Larisa," I said.

"You have seen war in your short life," she continued, "but not very much of it. Drugov fought for Polnya for twenty years, while I fought the Wood. Take what you saw, and multiply it over years, centuries. _That_ is war."

"But that's all over now," I said. "The Wood—"

"Do you think King Feodor has forgotten his disgrace at the Rydva?" said Drugov, still to the cabinet.

Larisa took my hand from across the table. "You must understand, we came because _we_ desired peace. We have held Feodor at bay, talking of this marriage." She ran her hands over mine, feeling the hardened grooves beneath my skin. "The Wood had us both for fools, it's true, Kasia, but we're not fools any longer. We must be strong, When we fought the Wood before, we were divided. Intention is nothing. But blood—blood speaks."

I thought, leaving them, that I had been foolish to go: the marriage had been their idea in the first place. Sometimes, I thought to write Nieshka, not just of the daily doings, or of how I wished it wasn't so, but more concretely, pleadingly, to ask her to come to the capital and  _do_ something, as she always knew how to. I knew she would leave her trees and Dvernik for Marisha—for me, if I asked, but each time I thought to, something stopped me. I was afraid that she _would_ come, but she would not really understand: she had been chosen, after all, and hadn't she done well; hadn't we all?

On the day of the signing, Stashek said to me that he did not like it any more than I did, but they had both of them grown up resigned to their fates. He got along well enough with his betrothed, Anna Sophia, the daughter of the Archduke of Varsha, who at eighteen was already a beauty. She had not yet come to live in the capital, but every Midwinter she opened the ball with Stashek, and lately they had fallen into a cordial familiarity.

"We've known it all our lives," he said to me in his quiet way. "Marisha as well as I, and I only wish—"

"Yes?" I said.

"It had to be done. I wish it was not so. Tell her, if she asks, that I did not want it to be Rosya."

"She has not spoken to you?"

He shivered, rubbing his arms with his hands, then caught himself, and placed one hand on his sword. "Father said such marriages were better," he said. "He loved my mother well enough, and that was a political marriage. I suppose it was… after Queen Hanna's running away, after all the songs..."

"That was the corruption," I said, gently.

"I know," he said. "And if the Wood hadn't taken him, we'd be stronger, with no need. But it isn't so. The Wood took her, then my grandfather, and then my parents, too. Talk to Marisha, won't you? I know she'll do her duty."

"If she comes to me," I said, "I will do what I can."

 

* * *

 

I had tried, after Nieshka was chosen, to imagine our positions reversed. I envisioned her walking down from the tower and coming straight to my house, a house I kept with a faceless man. Dressed in fine clothes and listlessly unhappy, she would thank me politely but without excitement over the following weeks as I made her favorite foods: stuffed cabbage and a large loaf of peasant bread, or even senkach cake, if she could stomach something so rich. She would hold up my children, her face brightening slightly, the dull look leaving her eyes momentarily as she cooed at them, and she would hand them back to me a little reluctantly. Then she would cup my face in her hands, lead me to the rocking chair by the fire. She would tell me that she had talked to the book merchants who had come only this week and would ride with them to the capital the day after tomorrow. Speaking of her plans, her face would come alive, and I would know: now, after everything, after the future she had taken from me when _she_ was the one who had been loved, _now_ she was leaving me.

It was unimaginable, that future, more terrible, even, than thinking of Nieshka alone in the tower with that crisp, cruel man who appeared out of nowhere—Marzena had said he was not cruel, but I could not see how it was so. I remembered the flame in the Dragon's hands, remembered how afraid I was that he would hurt Nieshka for taking my hand, and how fiercely I had loved her then. More than I had ever loved her before, and I _had_ loved Nieshka, loved following her through the woods, loved brushing the dirt off the backs of her skirts ineffectually before we went to meet Galinda. I had let go of her hand, fearful, apologetic, and somehow, inexplicably, she had been taken from me.

She had looked back at me, eyes wide, and then she was gone.

In that moment, I knew both that she had saved me—saved me from the Dragon—and that I hated her for it.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Marisha slipped through my door the day after the new treaty was signed, throwing herself before the fire. The maids curtsied and left us, and she rose again, immediately, impatient.

"You are the Countess Kazimiera Malgorzhata Algirdon," she said, "my brother's champion, and the head of my brother's guard."

She often began speaking in this way, preferring to work her way up to the question. I held out to her a long needle and a white cloth for hemstitching, and she grabbed them, crumpling the cloth, throwing it aside.

"I am the princess of Polnya, and in five years, I shall marry the Prince Dmitry of Rosya. Then I shall be the Princess of Rosya. So my brother has decreed, and the Magnati are pleased. The Falcon says it is for the best, and today the Baron Golshkin took me aside and told me that he may be the finest general born to Polnya in six decades but that doesn't mean he likes war, and it was a good thing I did today. He said my father would be proud."

She plopped down across the table from me. "Kasia," she said. "Kasia!"

"Yes," I said, "I'm listening."

"Didn't Solya ask you to marry him once? And the Count Kalonsky?"

"Yes."

She sighed, toying with the needle I had offered her. " _He_ doesn't even look at me."

She meant, I was sure, Prince Dmitry, who was only a boy, after all. "He's young," I said. I wanted to reach out, to take her hand, but I was afraid to touch her, to smother her as Galinda had sometimes done to me, tears in her eyes. Holding her tight, even crying into her hair, some part of me would think of how glad she was that it was me and not Nieshka who would be taken, and so I was afraid now that to Marisha, much beloved as I was, I was still less than a mother, and that it being so, my sympathy, my sorrow, would not be enough.

"He dances well," she said quietly. "I've watched him. But I do not know the Rosyan dances."

I thought of Marzena, how comforting I had found her factual way of speaking. "You can learn."

"Yes, I will learn. And I will go to Rosya. I shall be—I'll be too far away to come often. I suppose I might see Agnieszka, at times. She sometimes goes to Rosya, doesn't she?"

"There may be another way," I said, a little desperately, one of the only untruths I had ever told her.

"I shall be brave," she declared.

I held the cloth taut between my fingers, tensing my arms so I did not tremble. I didn't want her to be brave, I wanted to save her, and failing that, I wanted someone else to save her, as Nieshka, without even knowing it, had saved me ten years before—first from the Dragon, then from the Wood—and after that, saved us all.

"Will you go with me?" she said abruptly. "Stashek says—well, he may not need you, now the guard is more secure."

"I—" The thought that rose up in my head was Nieshka, in her tree-cottage. Then I berated myself for being silly. How often did I see her when we were at Gidna, or at court in Kralia? In all these years, she had come only thrice, and I had not been back at all. "Of course."

And so it was agreed.

 

* * *

 

 

Now I served Marisha as I had served her brother. After Prince Dmitry's envoy left—though the Drugovs stayed—Stashek named Grzegorz his captain, and I set aside my sword, to practice instead each afternoon the strange Rosyan vowels. I had always been good at keeping house, and though I did not miss the drudgery of cooking for my family, the blini, the cakes, the endless washing of pots and pans, I took up the cooking again, that Marisha might come to know what she had not eaten yet, that there would be one less unfamiliar thing when she got there. We learned the steps of the Rosyan dances together, skipping down halls in time, sometimes lightly, caught up in our joy of learning, and other times, heavily. The cold walls of the castle, its spires and onion domes, were part of me, I realized, and now I was leaving again.

Sometimes, late at night, she came to my room as she had not since she turned ten, and she clung to me, and I thought to tell her of my childhood. But what could I say that would help her? I had not been chosen, in the end, however terrible my childhood had been, imagining a horrid wizard locking me up in a tower. And when I had woken up there in Nieshka's little room atop that tower, struggled to sit up and seen the beautiful network of lines in her painting, fallen down the stairs and observed, as Nieshka dragged me upwards, the carefully placed cups in that tower's windows, descended into the basement kitchen with its endless stores to watch Kasia cut vegetables for a stew, it had not really been horrible, after all. Only beautiful and cold, just as Marzena had said.

But then, Nieshka had been with me. And I would be with Marisha. Nieshka, I thought, would have fought, but I could think of no solution. It would have to do.

 

 


	2. Rosya

* * *

 

It was in Rosya, four years later, that I first heard the frightening stories they told of Agnieszka, of the Wood Witch, as they called her, the facts of our lives so twisted in the tellings that at first I believed they talked not of Agnieszka at all, but of some malevolent spirit risen from the wood on the Rosyan border, a new Wood-queen.

More formally, they called her not Agnieszka of Dvernick, as was her name in Polnya, but the Witch of the Wood, for that was where she lived now, and they told of her tangled hair, often matted with leaves, the ripped hems of her simple dresses, and the large dirt smudges on her aprons. In the stories, she was never alone, but followed, a throng of bewitched stick-fingered walkers trailing behind her, each holding out a basket of the shining, golden fruit which drew naughty children out of the woods, out of the fields, out of their safe houses into the forest, where they might be caught. And then they lowered their voices and whispered: _Baba Jaga._

At first, even knowing their fear, hearing the name _Jaga_ , I was vaguely pleased—Nieshka had always loved Jaga. But I soon learned that in Rosya, Baba Jaga was something crueler than the witch of our tentative tales which the troubadours had sung only at midday. In Rosya, what we in Polnya barely remembered was unforgotten, retold, and respun, echoing, just as her looming, frightening laugh had about the large, crooked house she kept tottering on chicken legs. She was unliked, unforgiven for falling out of time and turning the guards to toads at Prince Vasily's christening. Neither witch nor demon, she was something in between: a spirit, and in the storybooks I leafed through, though she took many forms, there was always a speculative gleam in her eye—nothing like my brave Nisheka, honest, determined, willful and blind to danger when it suited her. Still, I thought it would please Nieshka, in its own way, to know that even here they talked of her as Jaga, and I filed it along with a dozen other things in a basket, for the first letter I wrote her from Rosya.

In my own valley—I still called it mine though I had not been there for near fifteen years—I knew they called her simply Agnieszka, or more often, Our Agnieszka, as we had once called the Dragon ours, too. Outside the valley, or at least in the capital and in Gidna and Galicia and all along the Rydva, they often said Agnieszka of the Valley, but, more often, the Water, or the River, or even the Spindle. It was the Willow who had named her, not long after the court had finally returned to Kralia our long convalescence in Gidna. Now, hearing how people talked of Agnieszka in Rosya, I remembered how the wizards too had thought to call Agnieszka the Wood once.

Alosha had invited me to the Charovnikov, where the wizards sometimes ate in style—mostly, I thought, so to please Ragostok's ego. They never really agreed on anything, but they tolerated each other—I suppose they knew they had to get along. I didn't belong there, but the Willow, who had examined me closely when we first came to the capital to be tried for corruption, rather thought that I would be long-lived, too, and somehow between this and Solya's encouragement and Alosha's impatient nodding, I became a regular presence when they all gathered, if only to ease the irritation they had built up towards each other after decades of association. Sarkan had only lately returned from Gidna, studying with the White Lark the magic tides which had so fascinated Alosha and the Willow while we were there, and while they talked of this, Solya smiled at me from behind his hand, and Ragostok slouched, the picture of boredom.

"But when shall your friend come to the capital?" said Solya to me, though he knew perfectly well Nieshka did not mean to come. "What do they call her now—still Agnieszka?"

"She won't," said Alosha, breaking off from her discussion. "She had no head for the dealings here."

"Nor do any of us," replied Sarkan. He jerked his chin towards Solya. "Save him. But we all do what we must."

Alosha bent her eyebrows together. "Then I wish you had been less ambitious, training her. She's still a girl, to be tied so to her home. We've need of her here. Sarkan, I've never felt anything like it—when she sang beside me as I worked my spells—like I had fallen in a river and she was pulling me along."

"Really?" said Solya, leaning forward. "So she did a great working with you, did she?"

"Don't be foolish!" snapped Alosha. "It was only to burn that book that killed poor Ballo."

"Shall we call her the River, then?" said the Willow. "She may like being merely Agnieszka, but it's better the people have a sense of her powers."

"Yes, Estera!" Alosha smiled, pleased, all her teeth showing, and I thought I had never seen her smile, really.

But Sarkan snorted. "Anyone of that valley could be called the River, even Kasia." He glanced at me. "Yes, you've a little power, too, Kasia. No more than any person who had grown up drinking Spindle-water, if they then became half tree. But Agnieszka's power is something more ancient, it thrives by the river—I'm not sure they can be separated—but it's of the earth, of the forest, the same power, I think, as the Wood-queen's, or the Wood, as it is now."

"Ah, but Agnieszka _is_ the only witch of that valley," replied Solya. He winked at me. "Kasia withstanding." 

"Of the Wood, too," returned Sarkan.

"The Wood, then," said Ragostok, wiping his mouth with a gold-threaded cloth he had conjured. "Agnieszka, the Wood."

Now Solya smiled. Sarkan looked thoughtful while Estera began to nod, slowly, the way she did when she saw the logic in something you were saying. But I shook my head fervently at Alosha—the Wood was something evil. How could they call Nieshka that? They had performed the ceremony, rung the bell, and nothing had sounded besides Agnieszka's own name. Surely that was what they should call her.

"There's power in names," said Alosha, with finality. "The River: it suits."

I turned the name over in my head, thinking of the clear, clean water of the Spindle, and wrote her the next night. _I think you will like being called that, Nieshka_. I didn't tell her how close she had been to being the Wood. I didn't think then that she would like it.

 

* * *

 

We came to Rosya through the northern mountain pass, and as we had climbed, looking down upon Polnya and Rosya, I found myself wishing for my valley. The Wood was visible this far up, green and and black and large, but its edges were no longer familiar. 

"I wish we could have seen Agnieszka, too," said Marisha, beside me, gazing down at the funny shape of the Wood. We were high enough up that we had climbed down our horses to lead them by the nose as they panted. She caught the look on my face and said, hurriedly, "And Natalya wrote to me—she's to be married next year, to a boy from Zatochek. I would have liked to meet him." She pursed her lips, thinking. "Perhaps when she is married, she shall visit me? Do you think—do you think it would be too much, Kasia?"

Marisha had been back to the valley twice, once with Alosha, who meant to consult Nieshka on some odd spell she had found. My duties in the capital had kept me that first time, and when Marisha returned, I listened hungrily to her stories. I learned more from Marisha than I did from Nieshka's letters, for Nieshka would never think to describe the hollow for sitting that she had spelled into existence by the window in her tree-cottage, only to stack blankets high upon it because she could not think of a good place for a cabinet, nor had she, when she came to capital, twirled along the stone floor and declared it was not as smooth as the polished wooden floor in her cottage. Marisha did both these, and bragged to me, too, that Agnieszka was dearly loved in the valley.

I meant to go a few years later, when Stashek decided he must have a grand tour, starting on the eastern end of Polnya, but the morning we were to depart, I felt so ill that I could hardly crawl out of bed, and Estera forbid me to join them until I was recovered, by which point Stashek was already in the Yellow Marshes. Nieshka had sent me a large jug of Spindle-water, forbidding me to give it to either of the children. "You must drink it all yourself," she wrote, "and if I find out you have not, I will come to the capital myself and pour it down your throat."

"Natalya?" asked Alosha, interrupting my thoughts. She had been waiting for us, I saw: this morning she had ridden out near the front.

"In Olshanka," replied Marisha. "Her mother's is the the large house with the porch."

Now I remembered Borys and Natalya, and their daughter Marta, who had stood beside Nieshka and I, in long black braids, and I found myself counting the years: Marta's daughter would be fifteen. "That's young," I said.

"Oh," said Marisha, laughing, "she says she is very in love, but her father will not let her marry until next year. It's very nice, don't you think?"

"Yes," I said absently. It would be—she had chosen, as they all did, not to leave, and she would never, as I was doing, look down on our valley and the Wood and what lay beyond it, from such heights, to see what a small place it was.

But that was the first time, too, that I had set foot outside Polnya despite all my childhood dreams. The vista was greatly familiar—the fields, the churches, the little houses—all of it looked much like Polnya. Still, I didn't like Rosya. I thought at first it was merely my unfamiliarity, or perhaps how unhappy I was for Marisha. Then we came to the Rosyan capital, Moskva, and I realized, coming through the great gates, that I had grown used to Polnya's woman soldiers and guards, grown used to blacksmith's stops manned by a bevy of cheerful women in headscarves who pressed jars of raspberry syrup and plates of sugared cake into our hands as they saw to our horses.

Marisha looked upon Rosya more happily: I think she was determined to like it. At the sight of the tall, austere walls of their castle, she exclaimed, "There! I do not think I have ever seen anything so grand!" and when Prince Dmitry came to greet us, she turned to me and said, "I was so young when I saw him last, I do not think I realized he was handsome."

"He was younger then, too," I said.

"Oh," she said, blushing, as he neared us. "Yes, I do not think he was so tall." Then she took his arm and allowed him to lead her inside.

"Well," Alosha said to me, handing her gloves to Renata, "I think _she_ will be busy for the afternoon. Shall we go see the Countess?"

 

* * *

 

Our ambassador, Countess Boguslava, was a tall, imposing woman with large, glittering eyes, who tended to flick her eyes up and down your face whenever you said anything at all. It didn't exactly make you trust her, but it did make her inscrutable, which, in the end, Stashek had decided was more important. No one in Rosya would ever _trust_ our ambassador anyway.

"So you are here," she said to us when we arrived at her house, a large white square building much taller than its neighbors. "Good, good. There is much I have to tell you."

She ushered us into a tiny room and held her finger to her lips when we tried to ask. Then she pointed at the door to Alosha, who finally understood what she wished and spoke a few long words of enchantment.

"Ah," said Boguslava, sighing, "what a relief, to say what I wish. You might have noticed you were being watched."

I had, but I was used to it by then: who wouldn't stare at me—tall, golden-haired, and part-tree? Riding through the wide streets, I had even felt an odd sense of relief: here, I was not a famed warrior, or Stashek's captain of the guard. I was nothing more than one of Marisha's ladies. 

"I am watched constantly," the countess continued. "I would have written you, Alosha, but I felt sure my letters were being read and they'd cracked the code."

"You couldn't return?"

"And leave them unwatched?" Boguslava shivered, and as with everything she did, I did not quite believe that she meant it, only that she wanted me to see her shiver. "Of course not!"

"Then?" promped Alosha.

"It's the Welder," said Boguslava, thrusting her hands out and smacking one against the wall. 

"You mean, he's not serious about the peace?"

"Oh, he is." Boguslava sniffed, rubbing her hand. "And that peasant woman he calls his wife. But it's peace with strings."

"But what have we done?" I asked her. "What could possibly have changed?"

Boguslava sighed. "It began—mostly—with a cow."

 

* * *

 

The trouble began, she told us, when Agnieszka had begun to live in the forest, fifteen years ago. She had come across a cow in the Wood one day, and befriended it as she herded it out of the Wood, because that was the sort of thing a witch like Agnieszka did. It was a Rosyan cow, and naturally it had some Rosyan tendencies, including a natural suspicion of Polnyans, but being a cow it was easily convinced, and so the friendship began between witch and cow, and Agnieszka would sometimes go to the little Rosyan village to feed it, or to talk to it, or otherwise entertain it. You would think a witch had better things to do, but you musn't question the workings of a Wood Witch.

Agnieszka did not spend her time _all_ on her new friend, of course. She had been slowly clearing the forest of corruption, freeing people who had only lately been trapped, or convincing them to sleep, properly. Though the Rosyans did not fully understand this, neither could the villagers keep from welcoming home their loved ones, and so talk slowly began of the strange woman in the Wood, and how she had helped Rosya. Naturally, King Feodor quite suspected the opposite, this being right after the Battle at the Rydva, and he sent soldiers to patrol the borders, and there began to be many more soldiers in that area than there had ever been, and there being soldiers there, business naturally followed, and tents were replaced with little houses, and dirt roads began to be paved, and so on and so forth.

Now, if this had happened in Polnya, it would mostly have been the end of it, except for a little trouble over our newest witch's odd attachment to trees—you would think that a woodcutter's daughter didn't care for such things, but after all Agnieszka was not a woodcutter herself, so perhaps there is something there—but Rosyans being… well, not as wise as us Polnyans, despite there being _more_ soldiers, a poor man who was quite hungry one day spotted this free-ranging cow that was a friend of Agnieszka's and decided to steal it! And not knowing his directions, he herded it right into the Wood, where the Agnieszka came upon them. The man, seeing Agnieszka, attempted to flee, but was kicked very soundly by the cow in a sensitive place, and Agnieszka, tying man on top of cow, marched them out of the forest and gave cow and man to the headwoman of that little Rosyan village.

That could have been the end of it too, but the poor man's sister was the Countess Drugova, who, when she heard of the matter, came down from Moskva, where she had recently moved after marrying the count, and when she saw the cow, she decided she loved it so that _she_ wanted the cow, too.

Now, we probably did not know this about cows but they actually liked to return to where they had been born, or, failing that to people they liked best, and this cow had been born not in the village where it lived, but in one the Wood swallowed up not six years before that, and so naturally the cow left Drugova and came to live with Agnieszka in the Wood. Agnieszka and Drugova fought over the cow, and once Drugova even brought the cow to Moscow, where it promptly ran away.

 

* * *

 

"Don't look at me like that," Boguslava said to Alosha as she told us this. "I have worked very hard piecing this all together. And it's not been easy."

"And the cow decided it would rather live with Agnieszka?"

"Yes, yes." The countess waved her hand airily. "Now, if you are satisfied?"

Alosha snorted. "Very well, continue."

 

* * *

 

The next part wasn't easy to tell, because Drugova's husband had been offered the ambassadorship to Polnya and naturally he could not refuse, so we must understand, of course, that most of this next part was very hard to discover, because Drugova was not eager for anything to endanger her husband's ambassadorship. In any case, Drugova accompanied her husband to Kralia, and she was obliged to wage her war from rather farther away. It wasn't as if Agnieszka was going to _kill_ the cow, but Drugova seemed to think her cow in eminent danger, and would try at every opportunity through the local courts to get Agnieszka to return her cow. This wasn't easy, for the cow was not Drugova's really, nor her brother's, and no one really knew _who_ the cow belonged to.

About this time, there being still many soldiers—partly Drugova's doing, because she wanted Agnieszka watched—the people who lived on the Wood's edge began, finally, to think of cutting down the trees in the Wood. They thought they were strong enough, now, to fight the Wood—yes, they still believed the Wood was not defeated—having been granted a reprieve, and they wished to burn it back, to make more room for themselves, and to keep Agnieszka away. This, the Wood Witch naturally did not mind, for what use had she of other people? But now let us recall that Agnieszka rather liked trees—an odd quality, but perhaps a woman who makes friends with cows can befriend anything, even trees, and perhaps it makes sense that a tree does not take to being cut down, at least so claimed Agnieszka on behalf of her friends, the trees! 

Not that the Rosyans listened, but when they tried to cut trees, they found the walkers of the Wood would gather, pushing them away, and soon enough Agnieszka would appear, more often than not with her cow, and she would cast some spell that repelled them from the Wood.

Which brought us, finally, to the present day. King Feodor desired the peace, but he did not, we must understand, tolerate cow-stealing or tree-saving at his borders. He wished to burn the Wood back, to the line through the forest where some old man once drew a line, and if his soldiers were stopped—by cow or wind or spell—he would set all his wizards upon the witch Agnieszka.

Oh—and he wished to stipulate as such before he allowed Dmitry's marriage—it wouldn't do to forget  _that_.

 

* * *

 

We were a little stunned, then, but already I was piecing together some of these things I had heard of Nieshka in Rosya: why they talked of walkers following her, and her strange affinity for animals. I thought Boguslava had rather got the wrong of it: the trouble _was_ over wood-cutting—or rather, the Wood, and what was to become of it.

"A cow," said Alosha. "Alicja, a  _cow_?"

The countess tittered into her hands—another gesture that did not quite suit her. "That's what I was told."

Alosha snorted. "I don't believe it."

"Very good!" Boguslava clapped her hands. Then she shot me a sharp look. "Perhaps you would know, Countess," she said, "the name of Agnieszka's apprentice?"

"Karolya," I replied, frowning. Yes—Karolya—a Rosyan name. I had always thought she was just a girl from our valley whose mother or grandmother might have come from Rosya, but I saw now that Nieshka had taken an Rosyan apprentice, one Larisa had wanted badly. 

"Yes, that's the one," said Boguslava grandly. "Karolina Smirnova—Drugova's niece."

 

* * *

 

It was just like Agnieszka, I thought later, rather irritably, to think such things as _borders_  or the business of _taking on apprentices_ need not follow any rules that weren't hers.

I did not know why I was upset: the thing I had dreaded—Marisha's marriage—was delayed, at least for now, as messengers rode back and forth betweeen Kralia and Moskva. Agnieszka, in explanation, had sent Stashek a letter which mentioned Karolya not at all, but rather talked of the magic lines in the valley and drought and terrible weather if the Wood were to be burned, and he had copied out a few lines in his letter to me, writing in exasperation: _Do you know what she means by this?_

I thought, at least, that I knew why Agnieszka would not let the Rosyans burn their forest back to the border. It was their own history they were burning: their own parents and brothers and grandparents who were dreaming in the heart-trees. But _of course_ Agnieszka's pleading otherwise would seem wicked, I realized too late, to those who did not trust her. I still recalled the sticky sap fingers binding my hands back, pushing my chin up, and the bark growing over me. That had been an unnatural act, but only, I realized now, in its malicious nature. Yet, if I had watched Agnieszka coax the wood shut over a sleeping old man, as she told me she had in Zatochek, all the while thinking she did not mean to help me, would I not have felt it was evil?

We remained Rosya as negotiations continued, fraught. Stashek thought it best that we stay—a signal of his faith that we would reach a good conclusion. He could not come to Moskva himself—Anna Sophia was with child—and Alosha would not hear of it, in any case. 

In those months, I went quite often to tea at the mansion Larisa shared with her husband. Their house was large, sprawling series of long buildings connected at odd intervals, all of which were strangely empty. They used every space in the house, but sparingly, as if they could not bear to make it a home. Yet she bustled about, as comfortable and smiling as ever.

"So now you know this business with my niece," she said to me at one of her parties one day, pouring a dab of essence in my teacup. "It is a dreadful thing, to hold up a peace for this, but once Feodor heard of it, he would not do otherwise."

"Do you mean to teach her, when all this is resolved?" I asked.

"Oh no, of course not! Drugov shall teach her," replied Larisa. "He's much finer with these things. I could never get the syllables right. And I hate charts—I was rubbish at those until he came teach me, forcing me to learn better. And that's what Karolya needs, too. Good practice."

"Drugov is much admired here," I said, not knowing what else to say.

"Yes, he is our best." She took up the pot of hot water and filled my teacup to the brim, diluting the tea until it was nigh undrinkable. "Here in Rosya, we went about the Wood wrong, I'm afraid. We were so much afraid of Polnya, we did not think to have _Drugov_ fight the Wood—not like your old king, sending Sarkan. It was the better thing to do."

"I suppose so," I said. "Though—"

"Ah yes, you were captured, weren't you?" she said, sighing. "Ah, Kasia, but you're lucky you got away."

"Oh?" said a man, sitting down beside us, and I realized I had seen him before, staring at me when we had been welcomed in Feodor's large hall of mirrors. He was Prince Pavel Gorchov, and his father was the famed Rosyan general Solya liked so much.

"Pasha!" exclaimed Larisa. "Have you met—the Countess Kazimiera Algirdon?"

"Algirdon," he murmured, bowing over my hand, and I knew in that instant I did not like him. "You must call me Pasha."

"And she is Kasia," said Larisa, beaming. "She was taken by the Wood, once."

"How frightful." He stroked over his fingers over my skin, finding how hard I was beneath it.

I snatched my hand away. "I was saved," I said.

"You mean—you were corrupted, then purged?" Prince Pavel had a large, wide smile which showed very straight white teeth. "That is an extraordinary thing—how?"

"By my friend—by the witch Agnieszka," I explained.

He dropped my hand, but I had no attention for that. I saw how Larisa was staring at me, her face white.

"And the Dragon. He—They—he had given her a task, for training," I said, inventing quickly. I had been afraid to talk of Nieshka to the Countess, and I was beginning to understand that she was quite fond of her niece. She and Drugov were childless, so I thought I understood. "She was his apprentice then."

"Of course!" she exclaimed, looking relieved. "Well, Kasia, you were blessed."

"Blessed," I echoed, and Pavel smiled at me.

In the weeks that followed he began to talk to me as if we were friends, Prince Pavel, as if by knowing this little bit of my history, he had come to know me. I could never decide if he was better or worse than Solya, who at least, I felt, was clever enough to know better. Pavel wasn't stupid, but he was younger than Solya, and his position more inherently stable, so he had never learned to think of others. Solya might have pointed out every lord and described their fortune and their habits, then implied that I should marry, but he would never have missed the look on my face or thought _I_ was enjoying his act.

"You'll need a husband," Pavel said to me, multiple times. "You _do_ mean to stay with the princess?"

"Of course!" I protested each time, though with repetition I realized that I hadn't, really. I had meant to see her through her first few years, and then thought to return to Polnya, to take up my captain's pin again. But I did not know that I _should_ leave Marisha—her need would not be less in the years to come.

"Tell me again why you aren't married?"

"It never came up," was my constant reply.

One time, after I said this, he raised up my chin with his hand, his thumb brushing over my lips. "Your people did not suffer enough, fighting the Wood, I think," he said. "You are—different, but still very beautiful. In Rosya, we do not hold your history against you. But Polnya, I hear, has only admiration for the strong. The Dragon, the Golden Queen, the Wood Witch, the King's Champion... they do not think to value beauty."

Mechanically, I smiled back at him, that desperate anger rising within me.

 

* * *

 

All that time leading up to Marisha's marriage, the date of which had finally been set, I could not decide how to feel—not that I had a choice. I was angry at myself for trusting Larisa in the first place, for choosing this life where I had to bite my tongue each time Pavel talked to me, for constantly thinking that there must be something I _could_ do. I knew I could take out a sword and cut my way through their court, or at least intimidate them into breaking off the treaty: but that would only lead to war, and we could not have that either. I thought sometimes that I might antagonize Larisa, simply to feel as if _something_ could be affected by me. But I knew it was _better_ for Larisa to like me, and to like Marisha—she would not let her dislike stand in the way of the marriage she sought, but she could still make Marisha's life difficult afterwards. And it was _better,_ too, to smile at Pavel, to let him believe falsehoods—what had I to gain by correcting him?

I smiled politely when people told me outrageous stories of Agnieszka, or when Prince Dmitry told me his marriage would have been seen to, if it weren't for that conniving backwards rural witch. People knew so little I could hardly begin to point out all the ways in which they were wrong, and every time I thought about it, I couldn't think how best to attack their ignorance.

I couldn't decide, either, how I wanted Marisha to feel—though that was even more ridiculous. When she spoke haltingly of how difficult it was talk of Dmitry, I was angry, yet when she skipped into my room, to show me a pendant he had given her, or a few scribbled lines of badly rhymed Polnyan, I felt equally angry. And who was I to command Marisha to feel a certain way? I began at last to understand why so many in Kralia had always talked to me with that bitter turn on their mouths. There was nothing I could hear, anymore, that did not make me feel powerless. I could do nothing, in the grand scheme of things, to save Marisha, and there was little I could do against the lies they spread about Agnieszka. As Stashek's champion and his captain, I had found easy satisfaction in _doing_ things, but trapped inside the castle at Moskva, I felt again as I had all my childhood. I could not even bring myself, when I wrote Nieshka, to tell her things that were not _facts_ —what we had eaten, or seen, or worn. I had not been able to visit her, not in fifteen years, no matter how I missed her, but at least I had been able to write her truthfully. Now I could not even do that.

 

* * *

 

One time, when we were just old enough to no longer think Zatochek too far for a day's wandering, Agnieszka and I had invented a game of sorts that involved telling stories. We were telling it in parts, and as usual, Agnieszka had liked it best when I talked of warriors and great ladies, but managed, each time she was speaking, to transform our story into a sort of animal parable:  _The Rabbit and The Hedgehog_ or  _How the Dragons Came to Roost in the Mountains_. As part of the game, when we had finished our part and wished the other to take a turn, we had either to act out in person what happened next, or win the race to the next tree, or the next house, or the next post. This was easier for Nieshka than it was for me—she was faster than me, for one—but she had also a gift for imitation. Watching her crouch, to imitate a cat, you could almost believe she  _was_ one, until another tree branch reached out and snagged at her ankles, tearing her dress, and she would giggle, losing focus, and ask me if it was bad enough we should mend it before she went home.

Our story that day had started easily enough: a girl in a cottage with her grandmother and a bear for a pet. She had been teaching it tricks—to turn on one foot and to come at her command, the way a dog might—when one day a hare spotted them. It waited until the girl had gone to sleep to sneak up to the bear: _Come out and play with us_. And so the bear began to have two lives, his days with the girl, and his nights with the animals of the forest. You could tell from the jumble who had invented which part, but we tried our best to patch it up as we went. Lost in our invention, and happily out-of-breath after each race, we went farther and farther from home, until we had run right up to the a black, burned patch and realized we were facing the Wood, near seven miles from home.

Clutching each other's hands, we stepped back, somehow unable to turn our backs on it. Then there was a hand was on my shoulder, and Agnieszka, looking over her shoulder, screamed.

"Run!" I told her, and I began to run, too, forwards—towards the Wood. I was willing to go into the Wood if it got me away from whatever was behind me, I was so afraid. Heavy footsteps followed me, and I ran faster.

"Alright, alright. Stop!" said a man's voice behind me.

"Let go!" commanded Agnieszka, whirling around, glaring at him, and then, suddenly, coming back towards me. She began to kick at him. "You shalln't take her! I won't let you! Let go, let _go_!"

"I will," he grunted. "Stop that! And stop running, too. I've no wish to go to the Wood, myself."

This calmed us, and we allowed ourselves enough patience, at least, to follow him away from the Wood's long shadow, until we could see, from the sun on his face, that he was just another man, though oddly pale.

"You could have come from the Wood just now," said Agnieszka. 

He laughed. "I've no death wish, child."

He spoke like enough to us, but with a little hesitance, and I understood suddenly that he was not of the valley. "They sometimes—they sometimes come back," I said. "And you think—at first—that they're only your brother, or your father until..."

"Ah," he said, stroking his chin. "No, I had not known. So Mama had the right of it, after all."

"Are you a—merchant?" I asked him.

"Close enough," he said, laughing. "I do sell things."

"Then you've come to sell things?"

"He hasn't," declared Agnieszka, and she pointed at his buttons: silver. "Too rich."

"Perhaps you've heard of my mother," he said to her. "Jadwiga Bach."

"That doesn't answer our question," she replied, ignoring my flinch at Jadwiga's name.

"Doesn't it? You weren't at the funeral last night, so you must be from the next village, eh?"

 _That_ stripped us of our suspicion, for we understood suddenly that he was Baba Ewa's nephew, come to Zatochek in his mother's lieu for his aunt's funeral. She had not returned once since she had left, and we knew she lived in Kralia, and was very rich. We began all at once to ask him questions.

"But what's this?" he said, laughing again—we were, I think, amusing to him, in our peasant ways. "Surely you don't wish to see Kralia."

"Of course we do!" said Agnieszka stoutly. "We shall—ride the cart all the way to the capital, and see the king's castle, and many other things, too!"

"You'd like to visit, hm?" he said. "Yes, that's good. You'll see that there are other ways to be."

Agnieszka wanted then to know if the cakes were really better in the capital, and what the ladies' dresses looked like, and if you could stand atop the king's tower and see where the sun went when it set. When he had answered these, she wanted to know where else he had been, and what he had done there.

"My trade is cloth," he explained to us. "I go where business demands. Ah, I wish my nephews could meet the two of you—they've no thought of leaving at all. But I suppose you can't ask people to change their ways. Such young men, the world at their feet... they'd make a fortune with me, if they only came."

"Do you," I started, before stopping. I hadn't ever told Agnieszka about my dreams.

"Yes?"

"Do you—do you have women apprentices—at your shop?"

I heard Agnieszka breathe in beside me.

"You like dresses, is that it?" said the man.

"No, it isn't like that!" said Nieshka immediately. "She only—"

"We're Dragon-born," I said.

He looked first at Agnieszka, and then at me, for what seemed a long time. "Ah." 

We had come to the garden of exotic flowers they kept at Zatochek's center, and he gazed absently at these, clearly thinking.

"My mother doesn't like to speak of the past," he said finally. "I thought it was the Wood, but I see there is something more." He knelt down, and so that his face was even with mine. "When it comes time you can ask my cousins for me—Antoni. They will know. Yes?"

I nodded, _yes_ , and he waved us away. "Go on, then, and don't go near the Wood—even  _I_ know that!"

Together, still holding hands, we headed back to our village, taking in the pastures bathed in pink light. When we reached her house, she turned to me impetuously. "You mean to leave," she said, and I could see in her face the accusation.

"I—I didn't want to tell you," I said quietly.

But she pressed my hand, and said urgently, "You must tell me everything, Kasia. Even if—even if you think I would not want to know. Promise me."

 _Yes_ , I promised her—but I didn't mean it. I had seen her face, and I knew that I had been right not tell her. There were some things we could never say. 

 

* * *

 

 

Marisha, for her part, told me she liked Dmitry well enough, but she did not like Rosya—she missed Kralia.

"I didn't want to miss it so," she told me one day as we rode along the river, "I thought—I thought if I did not love Polnya, I might come to love Rosya instead. It isn't bad here, but it—it isn't home."

I said nothing—what was there to say? I urged my horse to go faster and for a brief time allowed myself to think only of riding.

She gave me a long look after we'd returned, when the stable boys had taken the reins of our horses. "Thank you, Kasia," she said. "I never understood till we came here what you gave up for me."

That only made me more angry—and what if I hadn't meant for you to know, I wanted to say. Breaking my own promise—to be seen in Rosya as only one of Marisha's ladies, never as a threat—I went to Alosha that night to find a sword, that I might take it to the training yard to practice. But Alosha had gone to see the Drugovs. Her assistant, Renata, went to fetch her own weapon, instead.

"I'll have another easily enough," she said airily as she handed it over.

"Thank you," I said, the words sticking in my throat. I repeated them, louder.

She shook her head. "It's nothing. I've always wanted to do something for you, Kasia. I was sixteen when I saw you knock down Sir Lucivic at the Summer Fair. I knew then that I wanted most—to be a great warrior—was within my grasp. And you were always so kind, when I began to train with Alosha."

"I knew she was not an easy master."

"No harder than striving to be like you." She smiled, pulling out a pin and tucking back a stray strand of hair floating by her ear. Then she unbuttoned her coat, and I saw she had two long daggers strapped to her sides. "Now," she said, smiling, "shall we fight?"

 

* * *

 

 

The day before Marisha's marriage, there was a great uproar in the far part of town, and as the day went on, people began to look at me nervously. I did not understand—I had never made it obvious that I did not like the marriage. I thought I had been discreet. But finally, I realized that the two were connected: it was on account of the gathering mob that people were looking at me so. They had come straight through the city, screaming on the streets, into the castle's own courtyard, and, gathering with the other lords on the castle stairs, I saw that standing tall in a cart in the middle of it all, caught in a golden net, was a woman: Nieshka.

"Here is Agnieska of The Wood," they announced. "Brought to court to be tried for her crimes."

I do not think she knew how she looked, or much cared. Several leaves hung in her hair, and when she came forward, a few golden fruits fell out her dress. Mud streaks lined her sleeves. She looked of the Wood, only somehow whole, and happy, even despite what was around her.

"What is this!" demanded Marisha, her caution pushed aside. She was standing nearer Nieshka, next to the Rosyan king and prince, and she pulled at Dmitry's arm. "Dmitry," she pleaded, "It had all been arranged! Agnieszka was cleared of wrongdoing—it wasn't wrong of her to protect a Wood that belonged to your father!"

"She's corrupted, you spoiled brat!" cried a rider next to the cart, and I saw with a jolt that it was Larisa, and that next to her was Drugov. "The Wood infects everything—destroys everything!"

"Wrong!" said a voice in the crowd. " _You_ wanted this—"

"No—she took my sister and bound her to a tree!" said someone else.

And all at once, the crowd was roaring, fighting with itself. Perhaps because they screamed Rosyan, or even because it was Nieshka, now, who they focused on and not Queen Hanna, I thought they were worse than anything I had ever seen. Dmitry, glancing at Marisha's face, made some motions at the soldiers, and they took Nieshka out of the cart, pushing and shoving the commoners until a path opened up so they could pull her inside. I trailed behind, wishing Agnieszka would look back and somehow, miraculously, see me through the mass of finely trimmed beards and silks that were the Rosyan nobility.

"We shall have a trial," declared King Feodor, when we had assembled in haphazard order in his mirrored throne room. He was standing in front of his throne with his hand on his sword, looking quite grand. "We will hear the crimes this witch has commited—"

"But I have not done anything wrong," said Nieshka.

Drugov, who had refreshed himself—most likely with _Vanastalem—_ was standing beside her, and he laughed at this. "It's a test," he said to Feodor, who frowned at him angrily. "Believe me, Your Majesty. She is of the Wood, entirely." He paused, letting Feodor look Nieshka over—her torn dress, the dirt in her hair. "You see it, so do we. Now, if Polnya is not under her spell, they will see this clearly, and the marriage can go forward. Then we shall unite with Polnya, fight the Wood, and—defeat it forever."

"I am willing to be tried," Nieshka called out. "I did not even fight when they took me. But you must let me speak at my own trial."

"But you will bewitch us if you speak!" said one lord indignantly.

"Yes, as you have the Polnya king, and all Polnya!" shouted Drugov. "As you did once at a trial—Queen Hanna's—fifteen years ago!"

Nieshka looked at him scornfully. "I have already spoken in your court: do you think if I had any interest in that, I would not have already?"

"You wouldn't let us reclaim that village!" said Larisa, marching up. "You told us we couldn't have it back, though it was ours, and when we tried to cut the tree down, you stopped us!"

"The heart-trees!" cried Nieshka angrily. "If you had listened to me, you would have understood—my magic isn't _corrupted!_ And neither is yours, Larisa—no matter what your husband thinks! It's simply—"

"Polnya is corrupted!" yelled Drugov over her. "The witch Agnieszka bewitched them—King, Magnati, and all! My king, you must see—"

Prince Dmitry had stepped forward too, and I saw, rather than heard, the words on his lips. _It is too fast—lock up the witch—we shall have a real trial, not this show. And then we shall see about my marriage._

My heart sank as I saw the hard light in King Feodor's eyes. I knew already what would happen. I stood against the wall, clenching my fists, as the Rosyan soldiers dragged Agniezka away.

* * *

 

I could not help myself: I stormed after Larisa as all we lords and ladies dispersed.

"I thought," I said, grabbing her arm, "that you—wanted peace."

"Peace!" she leered, stopping abruptly. A redheaded girl walking beside her stopped suddenly too, probably shocked at this exclamation. "Peace with the devil! It's _you_ I should have fought—I should have known it was _you_ when I came to Kralia and saw how the king loved you, but I thought you, who had been so harmed by the Wood, would know better. A mistake!"

"Nieshka is not the Wood," I told her, at the end of my patience. "You didn't fight the Wood-queen, I did! It was I who took Alosha's sword and stabbed her, so I would know!"

"The Wood is in all of us," she said, looking at me incredulously. "It's why I brought your _friend_ here—to see how far the corruption spread. It's in you, and the princess—all of you—and me, too! The Wood doesn't leave you—you can't be _cured—_ the closer you are, the more it hurts. It brings out what is in us—what is truly in us. So we must beat it out with strength. We shall burn your—your _Nieshka_ , and then we shall burn every tree in that Wood to the ground! And if Polnya stands in our way, then you, and your dear Marisha, and everything there shall burn too!"

"You are deranged," I said, finally, not caring what she thought.

"Hah!" she said, sniffing. "I am done with you. Come, Karolya," she commanded, and the girl beside her—not a girl at all, I suddenly saw, but a woman, full-grown—darted me a sharp look, then meekly followed her aunt away.

 

* * *

 

The party that night—oh yes, it went on—was terrible to hear, the music drifting up from that awful mirrored place. I meant at first to go—Alosha had gone—but I did not see how it would fix things. The most terrible thing, I thought, was that either we would have war, or Marisha's marriage would go forward _and_ they would condemn Nieshka. Was Agnieszka worth starting a war for? _I_ thought so, but nobody else did, and I did not see how I could say so, either. So I lay there, thinking of how proud and beautiful Nieshka had been, and how little anyone else cared.

When I met the Drugovs, I had liked them, because I thought they had _seen_ me. I had not wanted to see Larisa I realized, truly _see_ her. She _had_ told me, in snatches, of how she feared the Wood, but I had not wished to see that it was Agnieszka she feared. I had let myself see only the easy truths. Maybe because I feared Agnieszka myself. Away from her, I had finally become somebody. I had been afraid to become nobody once more. When the Dragon had chosen her, it was as if all our fears had reversed, I understood now, remembering what I had seen in her face during the _Summoning_. Only we hadn't had time to face it, not while we were living from day to day, trying to escape the Wood's gaze. Then, after it was all over, all that had come before—the fears of our childhood—had become irrelevant, so I thought as I drifted into a half-sleep.

A sound woke me from these musings, and I looked up to see a pale hand at the door to my bedchamber, illuminating red hair and a pale face: Larisa's niece.

"Please," she whispered, so I rose, slipped on my shoes, and gathered my shawl about me.

She had a way of speaking that reminded me irrationally of Agnieszka, though her voice was nothing alike. She started from the beginning—how she had only been looking for her cow when she first met Agnieszka—yes, her cow, who really did like to wander into the Wood. From there, it was merely a matter of getting to know the Wood Witch, and deciding she  _would_ like to learn magic. It had all been very easy, until her father had found her sneaking off one day.

"I didn't mean to cause such trouble," she told me, as we poked at my fire. "Only—Agnieszka would teach us how to _really_ do things, and my aunt…"

"She brought you here, I heard."

"Yes, and my brother, too," she said. "That was really the crux of it—Drugov wanted to train my brother. He has magic, you know? The same as me. I wanted to teach him, but Aunt Lara said our ways were evil..." She clutched at her shoulders miserably. "She's more powerful than she knows, but she uses such spells… as hide her true strengh. And when she married Drugov, it was worse, because somehow he could twist the syllables together, to make her workings stronger. Only, it would never be… as if she learned properly from Nieshka."

"And the cow?" I asked—I could not help myself.

"Oh, that!" she exclaimed, her face alight, and again I thought of Agnieszka. "I invented the rumors, actually—I learned from the best, you know. I thought, if my aunt was going to wage a war against my teacher, I would have some revenge. Karolya is not so far from the Rosyan word for  _cow_ , and I had a cow..."

"So you have it still?"

"It lives with Nieshka—I couldn't have it in Moskva. Now Lara thinks  _it_ has been corrupted, too."

I remembered corrupted cows of Dvernik: they had been angry, charging, senseless, and terribly strong. "Doesn't she understand corruption?" I asked, before realizing Agniezka's apprentice might never have seen corruption first-hand.

She sighed, lines appearing about her mouth, and I remembered again that she was not so young. "We never understood the Wood as you did. In Polnya, you held the Wood at bay a hundred years—maybe more. You can't know… Aunt Lara was born three villages down from the Wood—not unlike Dvernik, I think, but they were all gone by the time she was fifteen. We... we knew enough not to let men who had disappeared into the Wood return to their homes—but you didn't always know who had been where… And our wizards were too busy to see to the villagers… Nieshka thinks the Wood acted differently for us—it could think, she said. Since  _we_  didn't know simple human malice from the Wood, we would turn on each other at the slightest provocation, suspecting corruption. And we did—and the Wood had our land faster than it ever had yours."

I remembered suddenly the empty house that the Drugovs lived in, the paintings sometimes set down against walls in parts where they did not entertain. Larisa did not feel at home there, I suspected—not there, or anywhere, except a place changed completely by the Wood. But she would not admit it: how could she, when the truth was so hard to face? All these years, hadn't I been running, too, from the truth?

And suddenly I knew what we had to do. "Have you—have you cast the _Summoning_?" I blurted out, remembering how Nieshka and Sarkan had finished the spell together without the book.

"Only once," Karolya said, frowning. "We cast it together—Nieshka, Alosha, and I. I'd never done anything more difficult in my life. I thought the book would never end."

"The book?" I said. I thought it had been lost—I remembered the beautiful cover sinking through the cracks.

She grinned at me. "I have a trick, do you want to see?" She turned to my window, and suddenly the glass become hazy, and I saw the outline, very dimly, of the familiar mountains that had been my friend growing up. 

"Come," she said, beckoning, and I stepped through it into the basement of the Dragon's tower.

 

* * *

 

We found the _Summoning_ tucked on a shelf in the library with many small, old-looking scraps that I knew at once to be Nieshka's brand of magic. The beautiful designs of the _Summoning_ 's cover had faded, dents marring its edges, and I saw at once that someone must have dug it up from deep below. Karolya grabbed it, and several of the other scraps. "Just in case," she said, looking a little pleased.

When I had last seen the tower, it had been crumbling, and leaning a little crookedly, white stones spilling through holes in its sides. It had been rebuilt with care, I saw, and in some of the windows, the same cups were displayed as I remembered from fifteen years before. The middle of the library was empty: all the Dragon's papers had been cleared off, but the a good portion of the shelves were still lined with his beautiful books, all of them bound in their own ways. The only thing that was truly different—and this surprised me—was how much colder it was, and I said as much to Karolya.

She laughed, then pulled me up the stairs, up two flights, until we came to Nieshka's old room, and I saw, with a start, that there was no top to the tower. A pale dome of light floated above us—"For rain," explained Karolya—but beyond that was only the night sky, the one I knew so well from my childhood.

That little bed was still there, with that slim book of Jaga's on its nightstand.

"She sleeps here sometimes," Karolya told me. "When she's tired—or when she wants to see the sky."

We used to love gazing at the stars long into the night, with a small fire dying between us. I thought to myself that the little bed was the last place I had ever lain next to Nieshka.

"Kasia," said Karolya.

I turned to her, starting.

She pointed at the doorway, through which I could see, shimmering, my suite in Rosya.

 

* * *

 

We dressed hurriedly once we were back, talking in snatches of what we meant to do. Before we left my room, I looked about it, thinking it might be the last time I saw this odd Rosyan room that I had grown used to, if we were caught. By my bed, I spotted the half-full jar of Spindle-water which Nieshka had sent along with her last letter:  _for you and Marisha_. I pointed to it, and Karolya said, "I would like to have some."

We shared it, passing the jar between us, and when we had drunk it all, we ventured out, feeling full and oddly courageous, as if we had really drunk half a jar of vodka between us. When we came to that great, mirrored room, we felt alongside the walls, careful not to seem as if we were together, until finally we found the perfect place. A door behind us opened out to a balcony no one wanted, since it was too cold for that, and next to it was a torch, that Karolya might read.

She knelt down behind me and began reading the  _Summoning_ quietly. I could hear the incantation from her lips, and hearing it, I felt lighter, happier. People passing by didn't frown at me, as they had all day, but smiled instead. I had thought the mirrored hall terrible during the official reception, an endless reflection of whispering lords and ladies hiding mocking smiles behind fans. Now I began to see that it was pretty, in its own right, and festive for a night such as this.

But just as my mood lifted, I began to feel a sense of dread instead. I could see Larisa and Drugov winding their way through the crowd, talking seriously with this Count and that—and they were all nodding. Feodor was frowning at Dmitry, who was dancing with Marisha, and Alosha was standing alone in her fine men's clothes. 

A whimpering came from behind me: Karolya. "I stopped it," she said, her face very pale, her hands trembling.

We were lucky to be near a door—I shoved her through it, onto an empty balcony. The cold air was a relief.

"I can't do it," she said miserably, folded in on herself. "I can't."

"Breathe," I commanded her, and when she had calmed down, I said, in a tone I usually used on Marisha, "Are you sure?"

"Agnieszka said—it isn't meant—you're not supposed to cast it alone. It's meant to be shared. Nieshka can, of course, but—" She leapt up, then swayed—she was very weak from the ending the spell—and fell to her knees again. I caught her arms, and she looked up at my face, blinking back angry tears. "We've wasted so much time: Nieshka could have done it alone, and she doesn't need the book, anyway! She already—knows the way. I should have—worked harder! I should have—!"

I knelt beside her. "Who should we ask—Alosha?"

She shook her head. "Alosha—I could not do it alone with her. We would need Agnieszka."

"Then I shall find her," I said with resolution.

"I'm sorry," she cried, her voice breaking. "I only—"

"No, Karolya, you mustn't apologize—you couldn't have known. Now, can you stand?" With my help, she stumbled to her feet, and she clutched at the wall for strength. "I will find Agnieszka," I promised her, "and you will cast the spell together." 

She nodded.

I squeezed her arm. "Go inside now," I said, "and act as normally as you can. I will fix this, and when we return we shall find you, for the last step."

 

* * *

 

I had told Karolya I could fix it, but I did not know what to do. I knew where the castle's dungeons were, but I couldn't be sure she was there. And if she wasn't, but I was found to be searching, then _I_ would be in trouble too and I could be of no good to anyone. I thought grimly that at least we would be put to death, together.

I wandered a few of the hallways listlessly, when, turning a corner, I ran into Pavel.

"Dance with me," he said, entreatingly, taking my hands in his.

"I can't," I said, putting him off and striding on. "I'm tired. It's been a long day."

He followed me. "But you're all dressed, and you haven't even gone!" he exclaimed—he must have missed me for the past hour. "Listen, Kasia, don't take it to heart. Marisha shall have her marriage. Feodor's ruled for thirty years, and half that time people have accused him of being corrupted himself. He won't believe the whole of Polnya corrupted."

I looked at him, desperate, and suddenly, I thought, haven't I been at court? "You're fond of me, aren't you, Pasha?" I found myself saying.

"Very," he replied, smiling.

"I _need_ to talk to Agnieszka. Do you know where she is?"

By his blinking I could tell that he could. "Why do you need that witch?" he demanded, looking less pleased.

"Please, Pasha, I _must_ talk to her."

"Don't worry, my sweet," he said, his expression changing again. He grinned down at me. " _I_ shall help you. Tell me what it is you need." He dropped my hands and stepped closer, his arms at my shoulders.

"No!" I pulled free of him. He rubbed his hand, frowning, and I realized I had not been careful to hide my strength. "It's Agnieszka I need," I said rapidly, to distract him.

"She's going to be tried by the king. You don't imagine you could free her?"

"Where is she!"

"Now, now, she's being held by wizards. If you were Polnya's Unbeatable, the King's Champion, that might be one thing—"

"I _am_ her—King Stashek's champion," I shouted at him. " _I_ brought Queen Hanna out of a burning heart-tree and kidnapped the young prince and princess to bring them to the Dragon's tower. _I_ stuck the legendary sword in the Golden Queen." I grabbed his shoulders and shook him, not caring for once about my strength. "Now tell me where she is!"

He gaped at me, swallowing a few times, and then, blinking, his face regained its handsome composure. "You?" he said. "Do you expect me to believe that?"

"You can," I told him, releasing him, seeing that he might be willing to cooperate. "In which case, you'd better tell me. Or you can doubt me, in which case, what is it to you?"

"Prettily said! Very well. They have her at Count Drugov's." He smiled, showing his teeth, and I knew I had injured his pride. "Is that all? I shall go, then."

"No, you don't," I said—he was headed straight to Drugov, I was sure.

Pavel swung around, drawing his sword, and I glanced desperately around me, then grabbed a torch from the wall, waving it before me. I did not like to fight with flame, but Alosha had insisted I learn. Now I was glad. I blocked his first stab, then another. He was testing me, seeing what I knew, and I saw in his eyes that he had begun to believe me.

He began cutting more brusquely, when he had run through the Polnyan style, and found that he could not beat me that way. The Rosyan style suited me more though: I was stronger than him, than any man he had ever fought. To counter him, I began to use the sweeping strokes Alosha had invented. But still I did not attack. 

Growing more confident—he did not know these counters and must have thought me desperate to be fighting so strangely—he sneered at me. "Careful—wouldn't want to set you burning." He feinted to the left then leapt forward, leaping at me.

I threw the torch aside, drew myself back against the wall, and rushed at him, crushing him against the other side of the hallway. His sword clattered to the ground.

"Do you believe me now?" I hissed at him.

"It was a mistake!" he told me, his tone utterly changed. "You ought to have told us from the beginning. We would have—if we had known who you were—"

"Don't speak," I said. I didn't know what I might do, if he kept talking. If they had known who I was, they would have painted me black with Nieshka, and there would be no one free to save her or Marisha now. I had bided my time, unhappily, but now I was rewarded for my patient act, for being only one of Marisha's ladies. He had never respected me—he had only admired my beauty—and his respect, if I had had it, would have gotten me killed. Angrily, I dragged him towards down the empty hallway towards the nearest closet.

"You'll leave me here," he said incredulously as I stuffed him inside, struggling violently until he hit his head upon a shelf and slumped against the wall. "And you've taken my sword. You can't, sweet Kasia, you can't."

"Don't worry," I said. "When I've fixed things, I shall free you. And you'll have your sword back, too."

"And if you die?" he whined.

I snorted. "Do you think I shall?"

 

* * *

 

 

I ran out the castle gates, thinking hard. Larisa and Drugov were both at the castle—I had seen them at the party. Nieshka had not fought at her trial, but I had to assume it was from fear of starting a war. Outside the gates there was a bun-seller who was only just packing his things, and I pressed my gloves—easily worth his horse—into his hands, took its reins, and rode towards Drugova's mansion, cold air whipping past me. My hands and ears began to burn, but I pressed forward. I knew with a stone in my heart, with an intuition I had built from all the years I had been at court, that if there was a trial tomorrow, nothing would save Nieshka. I should have done this from the first, I realized. It had always begun with Agnieszka.

Drugov's mansion, when I came upon it, was guarded by soldiers, more than I had imagined. Their arrows came at me, with heavy tips—a working by Drugov similar to Alosha's. My horse reared, struck in its hindleg, and I leapt off him, pushing him away. "Go!" I cried, running alone towards that strange, sprawling place. Another round of arrows came—I waved the sword in front of me, knocking them aside. There wasn't much harm in letting one hit me, but I was afraid they might be poisoned, or there might be some other magic upon them. When I reached the doors, I could hear the soldiers shouting to each other to brace against me. But I was stronger than them: with a great push, the doors fell open to me, and then the men behind it swarmed at me.

I realized that they were a blessing, in a way: they lined the halls, leading no doubt to where Agnieszka stayed. When I found a man of suitable height, I ripped his armor from him and used it first to knock the men in my way. They came at me with spears, which simply glanced off my skin.

"You won't get her," snarled one soldier—I knew him, I realized, from dancing with him. "They've trapped her—why do you want her—she can't even do magic—!"

"Kasia!" I heard someone cry, and I pushed him aside, running towards Nieshka's voice.

She was there, at the end of that long corridor with all the paintings leaning against the walls. Many of them had been knocked over.

"I need you," I told her simply.

Agnieszka raised a hand, and with a few neat words, the men all fell to sleep. "Come on, then," she said.

 

* * *

 

We found a pair of horse in Drugov's stable, and with a little muttering from Agnieszka, they decided they liked us well enough to allow us to mount. 

"Why didn't you write me?" she said, riding hard, "I could have—Drugova—I would have—"

"I didn't know," I said miserably. "I thought there wasn't anything to do—what could you have done?"

"Fought the Drugovs, I suppose," she said. "Or written the king to have him dismissed." 

"Why didn't you tell me?" I demanded, suddenly angry. "About Larisa—and what the Rosyans truly believed—and—"

"Nevermind, nevermind!" she said. "We haven't the time—we're almost at the castle now. What did you want me to do?"

"The _Summoning_ ," I said. "Karolya and I went to fetch it, so that you—Nieshka, are you tired? Because you must cast it—the  _Summoning—_ it's the only way."

She pulled up her horse. "I've checked. Multiple times. They're not corrupted."

"That isn't—you said they never _understood_ the Wood. Nobody does here, and they don't understand you, for that matter. But if you could show them…"

"Ah," said Nieshka, pushing her horse to start again. "Yes... yes! And if they could see the truth of—what they wish upon their children…"

"Can you do it?"

She drew a hand over her eyes. "I haven't slept," she said, "and I can hardly think straight. _Lirintalem_ would feed me, at least, if we had time for eating, but we haven't."

"Nieshka—"

"No," she said. "I can do it. The  _Summoning_ drives itself, you know—it wants you to find the truth, once you start. If Karolya is there, we will manage."

 

* * *

 

If Nieshka's appearance had not done her well that afternoon, it meant now that no one, seeing her in the beautiful black dress _Vanastalem_ had given her, thought she could be the Wood Witch. We joined the throng, pressing in, looking for Karolya.

"There," said a voice in my ear—Renata. She pointed to a small alcove, and we hurried over, the three of us, Nieshka mumbling to me about how she hated these tight dresses all the while. Karolya was very pale, but she managed a smile at Nieshka.

Now, again, I stood in front of them, as they both crouched down, and I told the people who passed that I did not want to dance, or socialize. I had come to watch Marisha, I said, to make sure she was safe, but I was tired.

I had forgotten about the glow, of course, for as the spell grew past what Karolya had managed by herself, the golden light began to shine through me into that room full of mirrors. At first, the people chattered more merrily, until, suddenly, illuminated, they began seeing thoughts in each other's faces, and had to back away, not liking what they saw.

It was Drugov that identified the source first, and he raced through the ballroom, shouting. He pointed a long arm at me, and began to chant, but Alosha stopped him. Still, everyone had figured what was going on, and now a crowd of soldiers ran towards me. Beside me, Renata undid her cape, to reveal a person full of weapons, and together we fought the soldiers, as the light grew, shining through me, and them, and everything.

With the help of another magician, Drugov had knocked Alosha aside, and now he pointed at me again, and I felt as if a hook had caught me by the throat as I was dragged across the room, towards him, leaving Nieshka and Karolya exposed. He looked past them, then, catching Karolya's red hair, looked again. "You!" he shouted, his concentration failing. I gasped for air as his spell was released and, recovering, hit him hard between the shoulder blades. Then I pushed and shoved until I had was near Nieshka again. 

Renata was pulled with a cry from before the two witches by five soldiers, and I heard, rather than saw, the slew of insults she threw of them as she whirled about, trying to free herself. I got there just in time as another soldier aimed his spear at Nieshka, shoving him out of the way. The _Summoning_ grew strong again—I could feel it. But something wasn't working. Nieshka was chanting the same line of the _Summoning_ over again and when she saw me, she pointed at Karolya, who was bleeding out from a wound in her side. For a moment, looking at her, I remembered those desperate moments in the tower, when Nieshka had been injured in the middle of this very same working. But there was no secret cabinet of potions here. I looked about desperately: Feodor had finally seen us, and he was frowning, waving away Marisha, who was trying to talk to him—to distract him most likely. I knelt beside Karolya, feeling her head. She was whispering something softly, a line of the _Summoning_ , only that was past now, and it was holding the spell back, I realized.

" _Shh_ ," I told her. "It's alright." She whimpered, and fell quiet. Beside me, I heard Nieshka sigh in relief, moving on with the spell again. But I could see, in the golden light of the spell, how long her day had been, how hungry she was, how she had kept from doing magic despite desperately wanting to, and how yet, she was afraid she did have not enough to keep it from collapsing. The trouble was not that the _Summoning_ would not help her find the truth, but that it would demand too much and drain her dry before it got there. 

I looked behind me. Renata had regained her position when she hurled two knives from the thick ribbing of her dress into the soldiers who had gotten her, and she stood before us with a spear she had claimed from them.

"Keep going," I told Nieshka, taking up the book again and flipping the pages. I had remembered finally something Sarkan had told me once. When I found a page stained with blood, I knew it was where they had stopped, and I fingered a few more, thinking of how Agnieszka had always said that her magic began with listening. I began simply to read the words when they seemed to match Nieshka's, that full feeling in my belly from the Spindle-water becoming fuller. Agnieszka's eyes widened, and she took my hand, squeezing. The spell grew stronger around us, and finally I realized that people had stopped rushing at Renata, to look in astonishment at each other and themselves.

"You do not want to marry me," said a voice, louder than the rest, with sudden clarity. It was Marisha, talking to the prince.

He shook his head, gazing at her. 

"Nor I, you." She laughed, a bright laugh I hadn't heard from her in ages. Turning to the king, she said, in a loud carrying voice, "But my brother wants peace. Don't you, too, King Feodor? Can't you believe me?"

I watched Feodor, who was frowning at Marisha, and turning back to look at her, I saw suddenly what he saw: flames around her in a small cabinet, and through the gap, the shadow of her mother's body being stabbed by Rosyan soldiers; the horrid snarl of the Wood-queen, as we stood in that tomb under the tower; the past four years drifting about the castle, never letting herself truly love any moment, because it would all be taken away from her; Stashek's stern, unhappy face and the hollow words he did not himself believe— _They will learn to love you, Marishu. How couldn't they?;_ practicing her steps, hoping she would be a good queen, crying to herself at night because _surely_ it wouldn't be so bad—surely Polnya was worth a marriage. Hadn't she always known it would be so?

"Karolya?" came a voice beside me. I tore my eyes away from Marisha, and found Larisa kneeling behind me, tearing at the cloth to reveal Karolya's wound. "No," she said. "No!" She glared at Nieshka. "You did this!" she said, but then she stopped, a little dazed, and could only stare.

"It's the _Summoning_ ," said Nieshka softly. "It shows _truth_."

Larisa shivered, gazing at Nieshka, and then I looked at Nieshka, too, and saw, suddenly, that she was shining with something other than the mere golden light of the truth. Her wisdom, her brave, stubborn, willful self gazed out from inside her and laughed at me, and I gazed at her with longing. Slowly, shifting, I saw more: how long she had loved me, how she missed me, how she had wondered why I had never come, not even once to see her. She had thought I was running from her, and sometimes, writing me, she thought perhaps she did not know me anymore.

I thought I could not bear to see it. Then she caught my hand.

We gazed at each other until the light dimmed.

 

* * *

  

Nieshka. Nieshka. Nieshka.

All around us, the people buzzed, but I could look at nothing else, think of no one else. Only Nieshka: her glowing face, her wide smile, the ache in her heart when she had see me again, at last. We separated ourselves from all the people who wished to talk to us and retired to my suite.

I pulled her in from the door, shut it. "You look exhausted."

She waved a hand. "It was nothing. I've had worse. You were there—remember?" And she gave a soft laugh full of amusement. Then she sighed. "I am sorry, Kasia," she said. "I should have known."

But I didn't want us to start with apologies. "No," I said.

She gave me a puzzled look. "You must let me explain."

I took her face between my hands. "We'll talk tomorrow," I promised. We didn't have to be brave now, not like when she had rescued me from the Wood. We could face it slowly. That was our mistake all those years ago—to think we could have moved beyond our hurts simply by knowing each other's pain, and not talking of it. "We'll talk every day for the rest of our lives," I promised her. 

Then I pressed my lips to hers.

She was still for a moment, and then she kissed me back, as sweetly as she had once held my hand: brave and tender and true.

 

* * *

 

The next morning, we stumbled downstairs together, holding hands, not caring in our joy how we looked. Nieshka had spelled a few simple dresses into being, and we darted into the kitchens, hungrily snatching up breads from the trays.

Alosha found us in the kitchens. "Come," she said, her mouth grim. 

Nieshka turned to look at me, laughing. "Will it never change?" she said. "We'll always be children to her."

"Hush," commanded Alosha, ushering us ahead of her into her suite. "What were you thinking!" she demanded of us when she had shut the door. "The _Summoning_!"

"Now, now, Alosha," said a flat voice that I realized was the Countess Boguslava. "You can't reason when you're angry. It's the first rule of diplomacy."

"I'm not shouting," said Alosha grimly. "You've never met Agnieszka, I have. It's her way, to rush into things, without thinking them through."

"It worked, didn't it?" cried Nieshka.

"Yes, and exposed Marisha's nightmares to the world! A dozen affairs uncovered, and the entire Rosyan court at war with itself! You were always rash, Agnieszka!"

"It wasn't her," I said. "It was—it was me."

Alosha stared at me, and I thought, furiously, that I had forgotten, in all my time in the castle, that once she had thought I should die, that Polnya could be safe from the Wood. I wasn't rash: I hadn't told a soul besides Nieshka of what I knew now about Spindle-water, nor had I, in all these months, lost my temper with Pavel—at least, not until the very end.

"I know," I said to her, as evenly as I could, "that there's much to do yet. And what demands they'll make of you or Nieshka, now they know what the  _Summoning_ can do for them—with treaties and marriages—well, I suppose we shall have to solve those. But wouldn't you rather—have the truth, when they arrange such things, things that affect so many lives?"

Alosha sighed. "How is it," she said, turning the countess, "that one can live near two hundred years without trouble, and suddenly—two infants—barely born—decide they know how the world should be and turn everything to chaos?"

"I wouldn't know," said the countess, much amused. "Let me live two hundred years, and I shall find out for you."

"Well," said Alosha, sitting down beside her, "I suppose I cannot pretend that I am not glad Drugov is dead. Yes"—she had caught the look that passed between Agnieszka and me—"he is dead."

"How could it be?" I said. "I did not even hit his head."

"Oh, it wasn't that." Boguslava rubbed her hands together. "He was perfectly fine until the light of the  _Summoning_ was upon everyone in that hall. You'd think it was merely the shock, seeing everyone's opinions of him, but they're saying he only starting stumbling when he found his wife and step-niece. Then he fell to his knees, clutching his head, and fainted dead away. Two hours later, he was dead." She clapped them together. "I haven't had such excitement in decades!"

" _You_ haven't," said Alosha. "And what about me?"

"Your trouble fifteen years ago—that doesn't count? I recall that you insisted you were fine, then spat blood all over my new dress."

Nieshka pointed at the door as the countess said this, and we were in perfect agreement: if we wished to avoid more scolding, we had to leave now.

"What do you think it was that killed poor Drugov?" Nieshka asked me later, when we were in safe again in my rooms.

I thought of what I had learned and took a deep breath—it was harder to say than I realized. I clasped her hands between mine for courage, and told her the truth: "You can't force a person to look at what they don't want to see."

 

 


	3. Agnieszka

Two weeks later, we left Rosya with Feodor's blessing, our wagons loaded with books and scrolls Alosha had found in their grand library, scrolls she wished to examine for what they said about Jaga. Agnieszka only laughed and said Alosha must write her, to tell her what she had found. I did not realize just how much I had missed Polnya until we crossed over the borders and, at the first inn, found a woman's troupe who crowded around Marisha when they recognized her and cheerfully told her they mightily approved of her actions.

As we passed through the mountains again, I could not help but gaze down at the valley, but with longing now, and in my head I counted how long it would be before Agnieszka and I could return there, before I could sample the golden fruit she had made and see the new things she had built for the valley.

"Here we are again," said Marisha to me lightly. "I didn't think it'd be so soon."

"Neither did I."

"It wasn't—what I expected," she said. "Rosya, Dmitry."

"I rather liked him," I confessed to her, "once I knew you didn't have to marry him."

"Me too. I could still," she said wistfully. Then she laughed. "Or I would, if it didn't mean—leaving home. Oh, Natalya is lucky."

"Marishu, you are young yet," I reminded her. It had become a refrain of sorts, I realized.

She blushed. "I know—it is just—strange, to find that things are not as I thought they would be."

I remembered looking at the space where Nieshka had disappeared—the first moment something had not been as it _should_. 

"Nothing has been as I expected," I said to Marisha. "And I'm glad of it."

 

* * *

 

 

As we neared the split, where one might take the road towards the Yellow Marshes, Marisha pulled my horse aside and she said to me, "Go, you and Agnieszka both. Alosha will watch over me well enough until we get to the capital. You can come, too, but later. And bring me some Spindle-water." I protested, but she pushed at me. "Go!" she cried. "Agnieszka is already up ahead."

That decided me, and I set my horse at a gallop, only to pull up abruptly when I found Agnieszka standing in some weeds in bare feet. She took a look at my horse and burst out laughing. "No," she said, pulling me off it, "that won't do at all," and she pushed it back towards the long caravan of the envoy.

"Are we—walking?" I asked her, watching my horse disappear over the hill.

But she only held out her hand, and when I grasped it, we were suddenly, nauseatingly, in Dvernik. 

"There!" she said, looking pleased.

"You too?" I said.

"Hah!" snorted Agnieszka. "So Karolya didn't tell you—did she call it her _trick_? It was _my_ spell, to begin with, though it's all the same for us. Mostly it's a matter of—feeling. I thought for a long time it had to do with—this valley. Mind you, we did have to perfect it a little—going back and forth between her house in Rosya and my tree and the tower. But it can be used—for anywhere, if you know it well enough."

"But you could have—"

"No," she said. "You have to—you have to know the place. And how it'll be. I couldn't have, in Moskva, unless you wanted me to bring you back to that dingy little room they had locked me in."

"And for Marisha to get home?" I said, looking about the village green, which had not changed at all since I had been here.

She wrinkled her nose. "Yes, I could have, but then Rosya would have known. I'd rather they didn't, until they liked me."

"What would Alosha say," I teased. "Now you have something to hide, if you perform the _Summoning_ , again."

She gave a great shout of laughter. "No," she declared. "It shall be Alosha's job, and Sarkan's, if he likes. I don't think they would like me at the capital—especially not Alosha."

"She misses you, you know," I said, and then I stopped, suddenly, for across the small village square, I had seen my mother's limp.

Agnieszka placed her hand on my elbow. "You don't have to," she whispered. "Not yet."

I knew I _would_ have to, eventually, but I let Agnieszka pull at me, down a path we had not taken since we were much younger, one that led directly into the Wood. Running down it now, hand in hand with her, I had to force myself to breathe—we were going towards the Wood. I had not been there since that awful trek with Marek. 

But it was not the Wood we ran into. We had entered some other place—a great forest, at peace, and it _felt_ like Agnieszka, the whole forest, heart-trees spreading, still and contented and yet—bubbling and alive and joyous. She brought me to a small clearing, in the center of which were two heart-trees, their tangled branches laden with golden fruit, and she jumped up and plucked one down for me, and again I felt how well they fit. She and the Wood, if I could call it that now.

We lay down in the shade of the trees, and gazing upwards into a bright sea of green I realized that I had never been running from our valley. Never been running from my mother, or from Agnieszka. I had only left, because I had to: sometimes you have to leave, to know where you belong.

"Nieshka," I said slowly, "do you think—don't you think they would like to know of your spell—Karolya's trick—in the capital?"

She laughed, delightedly. "Oh, yes."

"And do you think—well I think there might be a way, perhaps, to share Spindle-water... Do you think we could, without hurting anyone? In Kralia, we could…" I drifted off, thinking of how little she had liked Kralia before. But Kralia had become my home, as the Wood was hers. I still loved our valley—I had grown up here—and I thought I might come to love the Wood _because_ it was hers. But it wasn't home.

"Yes? In Kralia, we could?"

I sat up, looking at her, understanding finally what she had meant— _Oh, yes_. "You'll come with me?"

"And you with me." She eased the fruit from my hands and took a large bite of it, sighing in happiness. "Let's keep them guessing, for a while. We deserve that, don't you think? Then we'll show them my spell—and a few other things."

**Author's Note:**

> I hate to apologize for work I have done, but I feel that I have to: this story really took me by surprise. It just grew... and grew, and I really did run out of time to polish it up. I must thank Blazinghand for being super supportive and for reading this through at the last minute to catch all my silly errors. Any mistakes that remain are my own. Thank you, telarna, for giving me the opportunity to write this. Enjoy, and I hope you have a wonderful holiday season.


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